


Metamorphoses

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: (nor the devouring ages can destroy), Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Falling In Love, Family Dynamics, Gen, Ghosts, Growing Up, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 03:54:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7492785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is a cutting from the prized plant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphoses

**12.**

“Tsukiyama-san.”

He opens his eyes. Kaneki is propped up on the pillows next to him. The reading light above their heads casts shadows in his hair.

“Have you ever read this?”

Thackerey. _Vanity Fair_. Shuu feels his eyes attempt to fall shut. It’s hard not to roll away.

“Yes.”

Kaneki stares at him. Waiting. When Shuu does not immediately offer commentary, he frowns slightly. His hands shift on the book. Thick. His right thumb and middle fingers pinch his place. He’s only a couple of chapters in at the most.

“Did you not like it?”

It’s not that. Not entirely. Shuu licks his lips. They’re chapped. The air conditioning is on high to deal with the summer heat. He can see Kaneki’s gaze, tracking the movement of his tongue over his lips.

“It’s a novel without a hero,” he murmurs, and he does turn away then; he curls in on himself on the hotel bed. “Well-written. Well-received in its time.”

Kaneki breathes in. Out. Shuu tucks his cheek against the pillow. Stares at the creases in the linen. A stray dark hair. Kaneki’s from earlier in the night.

A click. Darkness. Shifting. Kaneki’s fingers against his shoulder. Tracing over the curve of bone. Muscle. He circles his nails feather light over the kakuhou. Presses slowly harder until he gains the response that he was seeking.

They do not talk. Not when they are like this. Kaneki touches. Traces. Takes.

Shuu hides his face in the crook of Kaneki’s shoulder. Shuts his eyes. He listens to Kaneki’s strange counting. 

1000\. 

993\. 

986\. 

At the foot of the bed, an old woman laughs.

 

**1.**

Shuu had, by all accounts, a sheltered childhood.

The Tsukiyama family’s estate grounds were large. There were long, twisting paths made of stone and gravel and concrete. They were divided by grassy lawns, decorative foliage, and flowers. There were statues and fountains made of granite and marble, and there were bronze and gold fittings on the mouths of the spouts. The mansion with its great rooms, grand carpets, and artistic pantheon of servants was much the same. Within the walls of the estate, the young master and heir never had to want for anything.

It was a pure and lonely existence.

It was simply the way of the place. Shuu was never bored. He never lacked for servants to bother with his questions and demands. It was the servants’ job to satisfy him, which was easy for his childish demands but not so for his increasing questions. He was an inquisitive child, and he was intelligent in a way that made him thirsty. 

It made him into a voracious reader for books and computers held the answers that the servants couldn’t provide him. He filled the hours between his lessons with every piece of reading material he could get his hands on. He read the classics and romance novels that his grandfather had filled the library with from his travels. He read his father’s newspapers and business reports, throwing the often empty study into disarray. He begged to read the manga and comics that the younger servants bought with their allowances. He even read the manuals for household appliances he wasn’t allowed to use and the back information for the rat and roach poisons in the groundskeeper’s shed. 

Even as a child, he knew this made him unusual. Eccentric, perhaps, in the old-fashioned use of the word like in the century-old novels his grandfather had favoured. In those tales, the sheltered young master either went on an adventure where he learned about the world, or he stayed home. Either way, he became even more peculiar. It was how he knew, even without ever leaving the estate, that he had no hope of ever fitting in to the world outside. Based on the uncertain looks even his father sometimes gave him, he was an anomaly within it.

“You’re like your mama,” his father said, standing in the entrance to the library, arms crossed and eyes hidden in the glare of the lights off his glasses. “She was brilliant and beautiful. I loved her very much. Just like you.”

No one is like Tsukiyama Shuu. That’s because he is like his mother. 

She was brilliant and beautiful. She was greatly loved. He never met her.

Shuu’s mother is dead.

 

**2.**

No pictures survive of Shuu’s mother.

It is, of course, better this way. Shuu’s mother was a ghoul. The less evidence of a ghoul’s existence, past or present, the better for the future of their offspring. A ghoul is illegal, a forbidden existence. A ghoul is less than a worm, less than the dirt the worm eats. Ghouls do not, by law and by majority opinion, deserve to live. Evidence of their existence should be erased because it is forbidden in the first place. It isn’t as if such a creature, less than dirt, has feelings.

This is not true.

There have been times that Shuu wishes this was true. It would be easier of these statements, which are recognised by law and by the world outside of the walls of his family’s estate, were true, but they are not. They cannot be. Shuu knows this because he is a ghoul. He lives that forbidden existence, and it hurts to think of his every moment like that. Because he hurts, he knows that he has feelings. In a lot of ways, he’s always felt too much. And, because he feels, he emphasises. 

He wishes.

It is a selfish wish, but Shuu wishes there was a picture. Just one. He only would have had to see it once. It could be destroyed after that. He wouldn’t forget. He would know what his mother looked like. 

When he was four and soft with innocence and the puppy fat of childhood, he would beg his father for every bit of information he could think of about his mother. He wanted to know what colour her hair and eyes had been; if her voice had been high or deep; if she liked to play the piano; if she enjoyed reading. Mirumo would smile and pat Shuu’s head, but the answer was always the same.

“She was just like you,” he would say, and his eyes would be very, very sad. “Mama is in the mirror and in you.”

Shuu had puffed out his cheeks because even he knew that this was not really an answer. But Mirumo always looked so sad when he answered Shuu’s question, so he hadn’t pushed. Seeing his father sad was a frightening thing because Mirumo was always so strong otherwise. At that tender age, Mirumo was a god-like figure, not only as a father but as a ghoul. He was in absolute control of his feelings. Of his wishes. To see him so sad—

No pictures survive of Shuu’s mother. 

It is better that way. 

But Shuu wishes his father could look at him without being sad. 

 

**3.**

Shuu grows up. He grows to be a lot of things. He’s intelligent and musically gifted. He’s athletic and well-coordinated. These things all make him an excellent hunter and an even more admirable ghoul. He’s eccentric in all the right ways for his breeding, and he can entertain simply by smiling. He is, most importantly as he hits his first growth spurt at twelve, aesthetically pleasing. 

A ghoul who is a pleasing imitation of humanity is more likely to survive than one who is not.

“He looks,” everyone says as Mirumo begins to present him at parties and at work, Shuu’s first trips outside of the estate, “like his mother.”

Mirumo smiles. So does Shuu. It makes one thing obvious:

Father and son look nothing alike.

This is deliberate.

Mirumo has a quiet, reserved dignity about him. A widower’s grief. He holds himself tall and remote, and, while he has always been kind and loving to Shuu, his eyes hold only sadness. It is the one emotion that Shuu has always known his father to possess.

So, since Shuu was six, he has spent hours standing in front of the mirror. Mama is in the mirror. Seeing Mama makes Mirumo sad. Shuu knows he can’t stop people from seeing his mother. He can’t cure his father’s grief. He can, however, be all the things that people seem to remember his mother for.

She was brilliant and beautiful. Full of smiles. Intelligent and spirited and full of life. She made people happy, and she was admired as a lady and as a ghoul. She was someone who people met and wanted to remember, for better or for worse. 

Standing in front of the mirror, Shuu looks for her. Catalogues what her face must have looked like based off people’s reactions to his own. What she must have smiled like and how she must have held herself. He adjusts his posture. The way he tilts his head. He mimics gestures. Presses his hand over his heart to feel its beat. A rocking, throbbing sensation.

Mama lives in him. 

Shuu lives for that.

 

**4.**

Until, when Shuu is fifteen and outside of the walls of the estate on his own for the first time, he doesn’t. 

A girl proclaims her love for him outside on the stairwell up to to their classroom. She is pretty. Small-boned and slender. She’s popular with both girls and boys, and Shuu had noticed her watching him for the past three months since the start of term. He hadn’t realised that it was because she likes him. Shuu is a ghoul who has been trained since birth to be careful of humans. It was the only part of his upbringing that wasn’t ridiculously sheltered. So, logically, he had thought she was a potential threat. That somehow she had seen through his façade. Through the brilliant, beautiful self he formed in the mirror. 

Through Mama.

For a long minute, he’s frozen. Adrift. Speechless. 

“I like you,” she repeats as she looks up at him, eyes becoming bright and voice starting to quiver, “Tsukiyama-kun.”

You. Tsukiyama-kun. Shuu swallows. His heart hammers in his ears. His stomach turns. He feels too much. He always has. He wishes—

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he’s surprised to realise that he means it; he knows from the way her lips tremble but her eyes stay dry that she hears it, “but I am unable to return your feelings.”

“Oh,” she breathes.

She does something very brave then. She shuts her eyes. Swallows as she clenches her hands in the hem of her sweater. She sucks in a deep breath. When she opens her eyes, she smiles sincerely. Her eyes are still watery, but she is so very strong.

“Thank you,” she says; it is the most honest thing that Shuu has ever heard. “You are very kind.” 

He manages to smile back. They return to class with the bell where everyone stares at them for the rest of the day. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t let on beyond the obvious, and he keeps his self-control because it is the least he can do. He manages to smile when he tells Matsumae what happened during the car ride home. He doesn’t ask if his father is home because he knows from the relaxed manner of the staff that the master is out. He climbs the stairs to his bedroom where he shuts the door.

He cries. 

It’s not because he is sad. It’s not because he wanted to return her feelings. He doesn’t love her, and it isn’t as if he could ever have a relationship with a human. Humans are food. The good ones are happy to be food. But, by and large, humans are bad. They are rotten and dirty, just like how they think ghouls are. They are poor sustenance, and their hubris of believing themselves better than ghouls makes them dangerous.

Even so, Shuu is happy. It reminds him that he is selfish, and that is why he cries.

_I like you, Tsukiyama-kun_

She is his age, so there is no way that she could have thought of his mother. It felt so good to be liked in that way. Even if it was by a human and humans are dangerous, Shuu is grateful. 

He didn’t know he could be liked as himself.

 

**5.**

It is dangerous to be liked as himself.

This, more than anything else, is what high school teaches him. Over the course of his high school career, Shuu has a total of twelve confessions. Ten are from girls and two are from boys. He rejects each one as sincerely as the first, which seems to be why no one spreads rumours about him afterwards although six of the girls and both boys cry. He gives them his handkerchief to keep. He worries that this is going to become a hated routine until he notices that the second boy has tied his around the handle of his baseball bag when their school team makes it to the Summer Koshien. Like a knight wearing his lady’s prize.

For a moment, Shuu almost wants to chase him onto the bus and accept his suit. Instead, he’s caught staring. The boy grins hugely, all his teeth showing. Shuu looks away hastily. He fumbles his hands. His face and neck feel hot. 

“Do you like him?” Hori asks later as they sit in a coffee house eight blocks from Anteiku.

Shuu sips his coffee. He finds that he doesn’t want to talk about it. After all, it wouldn’t matter if he did or he didn’t. Humans are humans, and they are food, and they are dangerous. So he looks down into his cup in his hands and doesn’t say anything. It’s uncharacteristic of him. He can feel Hori watching him.

He wants to reach out and puck her eyes from her head.

He wonders, that night as he carefully removes the liver from a thirty-two-years-old amateur boxer in a closed and darkened gymnasium, what it would be like to be in love. Such heavy thoughts threaten to spoil his meal, but he can’t chase them from his head. He makes the mistake of walking by a mirror after cleaning up his presence from the scene. In the dark, he can only see the shadow of his form, tall and well-muscled, imposing and predatory. The gym bag he holds contains his supplies and the liver, wrapped neatly and hygienically. For a moment, he is mesmerised.

Mama is in the mirror and in him.

When he gets home, he leaves the liver in the refrigerator. He sneaks past the night staff to the bathroom. He washes and climbs into bed. 

Pulls his covers up over his head.

He doesn’t want to see the ghost that comes in the night and stands at the end of his bed.

 

**6.**

Upon starting university, Shuu moves into his own flat.

It’s a very nice affair in the 20th ward. It has a wide balcony and ample space for visitors. Not that anyone ever visits. Not that he ever has anyone over that isn’t his family or Hori or the bits and pieces of people he selects for his personal consumption. It’s not like high school where he had to interact with the same people on a regular basis. He doesn’t run the chance of having anyone know him well enough to confess their feelings for him.

Consequently, upon staring university, Shuu begins to spend the majority of his time alone.

It is not something he notices until it has already become his routine. He’s out late a lot, either because of the Ghoul Restaurant or in his own personal pursuits. He takes his name as the Gourmet as seriously has he always has, and that, on top of university and occasional trips home to attend auctions with his father or other business, does not leave him much in the way of extensive personal time. He spends what free time he has around the flat. He reads. Listens to music. Updates his blog, although not as regularly as he did in high school. 

He gets used to sleeping with his bedroom lights on to chase the ghost away, and it makes the nights he spends back home awkward and unrestful. He becomes familiar with the minutiae of his flat in the way he’s familiar with nothing else. He finds that he likes watching movies on television while studying, and he enjoys working out in the building’s gym early in the morning before lecture. He goes shopping occasionally, just browsing through department stores and boutiques and enjoying being allowed to pick out his own things. He’s aware it makes his fashion tastes a bit eccentric, but that’s par for the course.

Two and a half years pass like this. Aside from Hori and his family, his interactions with others are ultimately meaningless. Humans are food, and other ghouls are opponents. He feels lonely most of the time, even though his life is technically full of people, and he tries to fill that loneliness with his studying, with stories in books, with hunting. He ends up spending more and more time in front of his bedroom mirror. It is much as he did when he was young, hours in the dead of night lost in the glass. 

Is this what his mother looked like?

People still say it. They smile their wistful, covetous smiles. His father still looks at him in that sad, searching way. Shuu, however, can’t help but feel cheated. He is proud of how he looks. He works very hard at it. But he is, unavoidably, very masculine in form. Of course he is. 

Shuu is a man.

And that’s just it. It’s not that he feels cheated. Rather, he feels like a cheat. Because he’s not his mother. He’s not the person that everyone looks for and loves. He doesn’t even know what about him resembles his mother aside from the mannerisms that he so carefully studied and cultivated to fit into her deceased image. At best, he’s incomplete. More likely, he’s just a poor imitation. The offspring. The leftover.

He is a cutting from the prized plant.

The ghost at the foot of his bed grins.

 

**7.**

Kamishiro Rize enters his life as everyone does: on the periphery. 

He hears about the Binge Eater first. That is how the ghoul world works. She’s encroaching on the territory of those based in the 20th Ward, and she’s having an easy time of it. It makes her flashy and less cautious than a ghoul should be. She leaves a mess, which makes the police talk to the Doves. In most other wards, this wouldn’t be unusual, but for the quiet, almost mundane 20th, it’s big news.

“Disgusting,” Madam A says when the Binge Eater comes up as the topic of conversation at the restaurant one blustery evening. “A lady gorging herself.”

Shuu traces a line through the thin blood sauce on his plate. Next to him, Souta chuckles, circling his forefinger in the air. 

“Some guys are into that sort of thing, you know.”

This type of conversation doesn’t interest Shuu. He defaults, as he always does when he plays this part of the Gourmet, to his mother. Her delicate but also predatory smile. The slight tilt to body language that moves him enticingly or just too close for comfort. 

“She must be very strong,” he says, diplomatic and all the more mocking for it.

When they finally meet, it is during one of Shuu’s semi-regular visits to Anteiku. Kamishiro isn’t at all what he thought she would be. She’s sitting by the window, two tables and the counter between them. She’s shapely and well-groomed. Her coffee cup is empty even of the dregs. She’s reading _Hardboiled and Hard Luck_.

“That’s her,” Yoshimura whispers when he brings Shuu his coffee 

Shuu nods. Yoshimura steps back to return to his work. Shuu leans over, rummaging through his book bag for his social psychology text. He’s tired and feels off, which is why he came to Anteiku in the first place. When he straightens up, Kamishiro is staring at him. Her glasses glint in the sunlight.

They end up walking together that evening. They talk about books. Kamishiro is very well-read, so the conversation is stimulating. She has opinions on what she’s read as well, and she isn’t afraid to voice them. It’s refreshing. Shuu realises as they part ways by a crosswalk that he hasn’t had to think of his mother once. It’s exhilarating. His mother occupies his mind entirely these days.

“We should speak again,” he says.

She smiles a little, eyes moving behind her glasses as she looks up at him. “We have interesting tastes.”

The next couple of months are exciting. Shuu feels alive. He only sees Kamishiro once a week on Wednesdays after his mid-afternoon lecture, but they sit together at Anteiku for coffee and then go walking afterwards. They go, after that first time, to bookshops, and they take turns showing each other what they’ve read and enjoyed or didn’t enjoy. In this way, they end up talking about all manner of things. Kamishiro is gifted in double entendre for who and what they are, and Shuu revels in her daring. 

Until, flayed open and humiliated, he doesn’t.

 

**8.**

A lot of things happen between his fallout with Kamishiro and failing to eat Kaneki. 

But none of them matter.

Why should they? 

“It’s so human,” Kamishiro sneers; “It’s comical.”

The ghost at the foot of his bed laughs.

 

**9.**

The white-haired Kaneki, by all rights and predictions, should have been ruined. Any normal creature would be wretched at best or perverted at worst by his experiences. Shuu would know. He might sit high above the rabble by birth, but he has no qualms about getting dirt under his fingernails. He ate himself. He lures people to death for his enjoyment. He got the replacement scrapper for Madam A.

But Kaneki is different. He is unique. It isn’t just his biology. It isn’t just his circumstances. It is that ambrosia of _je ne sais quoi_ that Shuu has only had scant tastes and teases of in the memory of blood and sweat and heady, scented fabric and flesh. Somehow what happened in his time with Aogiri Tree that stripped him of his innocent eyes and gentle demeanour has become the perfect seasoning. And, drenched in the gore of other ghouls, half-raving and brutal with bloodlust, he is ascended. 

Ovid said, “I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities.”

Shuu gets to witness this mythological occurrence every week now. It’s exhilarating and glorious, and he doesn’t have to do anything. Kaneki tears deep into the bellies of his enemies, emerging each time as something else. A deeper, richer, more complex flavour. An entity of flesh and bone and a thousand impressions of other bodies and forms.

Kaneki looks up at him one of these evenings, bent deep inside of his prey’s torso. Blood is smeared over the entirety of his face. Banjou, the weakling, has already left the room. It’s just Tsukiyama, Kaneki, and Kaneki’s feast in the dimly lit convenience store back room.

“Tsukiyama-san…”

It draws Shuu from his seat against the wall. Kaneki watches him, pupils blown and hazy. Bits of kidney are still in his tongue. Twin trickles of drool mixed with blood dribble down from the sides of his mouth. 

Shuu crouches an arm’s length from the body. Tilts himself forward. Smiles. Kaneki blinks. His fingers curls in the ravaged flesh. It squelches. 

“Are you full, Kaneki-kun?”

He looks down. Twists his hands in the mess. He pulls at the intestines, slippery and hard to grasp, still connected in places, until the mass begins to stretch. He lifts the mutilated tissue, sloppy and splattering, the ruptured stomach sliding away and splashing over his knees. He steps on the abandoned organ as he stands, the body convulsing as he tears the intestines free. 

“Aah—”

The intestines stink. They always do, being part of the lower digestive tract. They’re split and mangled and Kaneki is looping them around Shuu’s shoulders with a wide, bloody smile and hazy, feverish eyes. Blood mixed in drool drips from Kaneki’s mouth onto Shuu’s face. 

“You look like a model.”

It is the most honest thing that Shuu has ever heard. It roots him to the spot. It keeps his face upturned as Kaneki leans down and licks a bit of kidney that had dribbled down onto his cheek. The waste and blood of the intestines soak through his shirt.

It is dangerous to be liked as himself.

 

**10.**

After that incident, Shuu stops going home. 

He makes up excuses. Some are better than others. Either way, they’re accepted easily by Matsumae, who is the main person he communicates with these days. Since Shuu entered university, he’s seen less and less of his father. Mirumo is busy as he’s always been, and Shuu is busy, too, with his excuses. It’s part of growing up. It’s part of life.

His mother reflects in the mirror.

“What are you doing?”

Kaneki stands in the open bathroom door. Shuu turns. Lifts the hairbrushes briefly from the sink. Soap water drips back into the basin.

“Cleaning these.”

For a moment, Kaneki simply stares. Uncomprehending. Then he blinks, and the frown that settles over his features is a soft one. Almost like before, when he was soft to match.

“Oh,” he says, very simply, before turning and heading towards the living room.

They encounter each other like this as summer blooms. There are a thousand things growing between them. Shuu dreams of sitting in a field and plucking rough dandelions and red, red poppies between crevices of rotten bones. He stirs awake, his fingers curled in the fabric of his bedding. Sometimes, he wakes up with tears on his face. The ghost cackles now, the form that of an old woman. On the nights he wakes in tears, he can’t even huddle back under his blanket to escape her laughter.

“Beautiful…”

Kaneki is in one of his moods. He’s painting slow, uneven spirals of blood along the spiral of Shuu’s kagune. Shuu sits properly. Tightly. He wraps his kagune around himself even tighter, trying to avoid Kaneki’s painting. Kaneki does not notice. He outlines the faint grooves of Shuu’s kagune. Clicks his nails on the faint ridges.

“Thank you,” he says, looking at Shuu; he does not see him; he sees what he wants to see. “You are very kind.”

Banjou sits in the door to the warehouse. Hands over his ears. Fingers around the back of his skull. Shuu hates him. The broken bones of Kaneki’s meal litter the concrete. Kaneki smears his work over Shuu, gazing with eyes that love and covet the brilliant, beautiful self formed as a mirror.

It is selfish, but it makes Shuu feel so alive.

He does not revel in the feeling. He learned his lesson with Kamishiro. Shuu cannot lose himself. That is a human quality, and Shuu is not human. He is a ghoul because his mother was, and he lives for his mother. As his mother. Sprouting and blooming from her corpse. Twining and snarling in her bones. 

He lives, in these moments, the purest and loneliest love imaginable.

 

**11.**

It grows.

In the garden of bones and rot, filled with weeds and snarled roses, populated by skulls bone dry and picked clean. Skulls are Kaneki’s favourites, the brains, eyes, and tongues his banquet’s main course. The stench lingers on his breath for days, and Shuu knows it’s time to feed him when it fades. 

“I like you,” Kaneki murmurs, leaning close but not touching; the scent of liver and eyeball on his breath curls with each word. “Tsukiyama-san.”

Shuu smiles. Kaneki breathes out. A ghost’s kiss. The taste of shared rot.

“Thank you,” he says; a confession; a good memory twisted and snarled. “You are very kind.”

In the garden, Kaneki wreathes Shuu in intestines. He makes crowns from fingers and toes tied with their tendons and makes Shuu king of a boneyard kingdom. Shuu fills Kaneki with his thorns, roots himself down in Kaneki’s festering flesh and blooms in the image reflected in Kaneki’s eyes. 

It is the most natural thing in the world. They are each other’s gardens. They are each a cannibal rose. For Kaneki, who has Kamishiro within him, it means he gorges himself upon Shuu, who offers up corpses for that gluttonous pleasure. For Shuu, he has but to gaze into Kaneki’s eyes, into that beloved, coveted image of a ghoul, to hear his father’s words, echoing evermore:

Mama is in the mirror and in you.

 

**13.**

No one is like Tsukiyama Shuu.

Shuu is like his mother.

He’s dead.


End file.
